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Contributions in Black Studies

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Contributions in Black Studies: A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies (CIBS) was launched in 1977. Michael Thelwell of the Du Bois Department at UMass Amherst and Eugene Terry, at that time a faculty member at Hampshire College, served as the founding editors. CIBS was a Five College collaboration of Africana Studies scholars at UMass Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, and Smith Colleges. that lasted over two decades. The journal ceased publication in 1999. The W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies is pleased to place the journal in this electronic repository and hopes that it gives the fine scholarship CIBS contains a second life in the worldwide web. We offer it as an homage to the generous spirit of the co-founder of CIBS, Dr. Eugene Terry, who died on January 9, 2008, at his home in Amherst, MA. Professor Ernest Allen and Amilcar Shabazz, Professor and Chair of the Du Bois Department, produced this electronic collection with technical assistance from Thomas Edge, then a doctoral student in the Du Bois Department; Marilyn Billings, Steven Folsom, and Isabel Espinal, with the UMass Amherst Du Bois Library; and Zane Mattingly with The Berkeley Electronic Press. Queries about this electronic collection of CIBS should be sent to the Du Bois Department.
A vehicle for the presentation of scholarship in Black Studies by students and faculty of the five colleges, with a particular focus on work presented in the five college seminars in African and Afro-American Studies. Because participation in these seminars extends beyond the five college community the work generated by the seminars is not limited to that of members of this community. --from The Editors in the 1977 inaugural issue

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 126
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    PublicationOpen Access
    The Political Reality of Prisons
    Viets, Debbie
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    PublicationOpen Access
    RENE MARAN'S BATOUALA AND THE PRIX-GONCOURT
    Smith, Alice J.
    A version of this article was presented before the Five College Faculty Seminar in African Studies in 1981. It emerges from the author's specialization in West African and Caribbean Francophone Literature.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    A Sociological Interpretation of Aminata Sow Fall's The Beggars Strike
    (1992) Beeman, Mark
    Aminata Sow Fall's Novel, The Beggars' Strike, is an account of a fictional strike in a West African Society. In this story state bureaucrats, who think beggars discourage tourism from the West, decide to rid the city of begging. The policy is implemented through police tactics of harassment, physical abuse, and imprisonment of beggars. This unbearable situation prompts the beggars to organize a strike in which they refuse to return to the city streets to receive donations. The novel portrays the beggars as an integral part of the society's social structure, and their removal creates profound disruptions in people's everyday lives. Fall's novel constructs a paradigmatic framework to help the reader understand how begging fits into West African society. This view is particularly informative for Western readers who may believe that begging is marginal or dysfunctional. In this paper I outline the two major macrosociological views of society: conflict theory and structural functionalism. I argue that Aminata Sow Fall presents the institution of begging from a point of view consistent with the structural-functionalist sociological approach.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Hard Times in an African Eden: Aminata Sow Fall's L'Appel des Arenes
    (1992) Henderson, Heather
    Like Charles Dickens' Hard Times, L' appel des arenes depicts a modern wasteland: just as factories and industrial cities blight the landscape of the English midlands in Dickens' novel, so Aminata Sow Fall depicts a land laid waste by "the winds of the West" (88). The harmattan blows throughout the book: the countryside is ravaged by drought and villages are emptied by the exodus of young people to the cities. In both novels, traditional agrarian ways of life are devastated by the arrival of technology and foreign values. Personal relationships, particularly the close kinship network of family ard community, are shattered by the alienating, isolating tendencies of the modern world.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Perfidious Albion: Britain, the USA, and Slavery in ther 1840s and 1860s
    (1995) Sherwood, Marika
    Britain outlawed trading in slaves in 1807; subsequent legislation tightened up the law, and the Royal Navy's cruisers on the West Coast attempted to prevent the export ofany more enslaved Africans. From 1808 through the 1860s, Britain also exerted considerable pressure (accompanied by equally considerable sums of money) on the U.S.A., Brazil, and European countries in the trade to cease their slaving. Subsequently, at the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, which was at least partly fought over the issue of the extension of slavery, Britain declared her neutrality. Insofar as appearances were concerned, the British government both engaged in a vigorous suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and kept a distance from Confederate rebels during the American Civil War. But is that the whole story regarding Britain, the trade in enslaved Africans, and slavery? Did the British government prosecute Britons who broke the law with the utmost rigor, for example? And to what extent did that government maintain its professed neutrality in the "war between the states"?
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Ever Feeling One's Twoness: "Double Ideals" and "Double Consciousness" in the Souls of Black Folk
    (1992) Allen, Ernest
    In his The Souls of Black Folk published at the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois posited the existence of a duality within Afro-American life.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    SCULPTURE BY DORRANCE J. HILL
    HILL, DORRANCE
    Images and commentary on the Sculpture of Dorrance J. Hill
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life Lived Experimentally and Self-Documented
    (1986) Drake, St. Clair
    The man died in self-imposed exile on the West Coast of Africa-at the age of 95-and the news of his passing was spread from coast to coast in the land of his birth by a curious coincidence. Tens of thousands of Negro Americans were converging upon the nation's capital as he lay dying. They were participating in a "March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom"--at least one out of every fifty adult Negroes in the United States was involved. The next day when they were assembled before Lincoln's monument, the Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced to the vast throng that the news had just come that one of the founders of the N.A.A.C.P. had died on the eve of the March, Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, in Accra, Ghana. Many were surprised that his name was mentioned at all, for "the old man" had been something of an embarassment to Negro and white liberals because he had joined the American Communist Party in 1961 and had renounced his citizenship to become a Ghanaian in 1962. The fact that he was mentioned at all on the occasion of the March was not only a tribute to the courage of the man who felt that it was proper and fitting to do so, but it also gives vivid corroboration to the hypothesis that Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, whatever he might do, had had such an impact upon American history that he could not be ignored-that his name is secure in the list of 19th and 20th Century American "immortals." Indeed, during this very week, a memorial service is being held for him at Carnegie Hall in New York and the list of sponsors reads like a roster of the country's most distinguished social scientists and literary figures.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Notes on Contributors
    (1994)
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Black Springfield: A Historical Study
    Kazini, Imani
    Part Two of article on the history of African Americans in Springfield, Massachusetts. This article covers the period since 1900. It was written by an undergraduate Afro-American Studies student at UMass Amherst as her senior thesis.